Exhibition Highlights

While many know Nan Goldin as a legendary photographer, this exhibition invites you to see her work in a new light: as a filmmaker. The Grand Palais is proud to host France’s first-ever retrospective dedicated to her videos and slideshows—vivid pieces the artist describes as “films made up of stills.” It is a deeply personal journey through Goldin's life, her friendships, her loves, and the challenges she has faced along the way.

The exhibition brings together six landmark works spanning fifty years of her career. You will experience her masterpiece, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), alongside The Other Side (1992–2021), a moving tribute to her trans friends captured between 1972 and 2010. Goldin also shares raw, powerful reflections in Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), which explores family trauma and the silence surrounding suicide.

The journey continues with two contrasting pieces: Memory Lost (2019–2021), a vivid look at the experience of drug withdrawal, and Sirens (2019–2020), which captures the intensity of drug ecstasy. Finally, the exhibition features Stendhal Syndrome (2024). Drawing on myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this new work explores that overwhelming feeling of being moved to the point of collapse by the sheer beauty of art.